1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device for refilling a head with ink in an ink-jet printer. More particularly, it relates to an ink supply device for an ink-jet printer which is designed to be small and light which will continuously furnish a minimum amount of ink to an ink-jet printer's recording head, and is of improved construction, thus assuring high speed performance.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Generally, an ink-jet printer uses electrostatic acceleration and deflection of ink particles discharged from nozzles to form characters on plain paper in a dot-matrix format. Such a printer includes a carriage that is held on a main frame and slides to right and left by a timing belt under the guidance of a carriage shaft, a head installed on the carriage and having a nozzle for spraying ink particles with the head's moving along with the carriage, and a home position area periodically cleaning or closing the head in response to a cleaning signal during printing. According to the ink-jet printer, as the carriage on the main frame moves to right and left, the head slides to right and left so that ink particles are jetted out from the nozzle of the head in a predetermined form to form characters on paper. One such ink-jet printer is discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,469,201 to Paul R. Erickson entitled Ink Supply Line Support For Continuous Ink Refill System For Disposable Ink Jet Cartridges.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,598,198 to Thomas N. Taylor, et al. entitled Printer Ink Regulation System describes a similar ink refilling system with ink is supplied to a print head through a tube, or conduit. This system utilizes a sensor to determine the level of ink in the head and controls a valve to open in order to supply ink from an ink supply tank which holds a large amount of ink